


Victorious

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the got_exchange Kink Meme</p>
<p>Prompt:  Set right after the end of ADWD. She thinks he is dead, and she blames him, for dying in the attempt of saving someone else's daughter, and leaving his own daughter alone. She blames Melisandre, for not being able to see his death coming, but in the end, she blames herself, for bringing him the red priestess, and convincing him he was R'hllor chosen.<br/>Bonus if he's actually alive and comes back to his wife and daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victorious

Selyse doesn’t bother to weep any longer. She doesn’t grieve for their situation, forgotten in a drafty castle on the edge of the world, with only a skeleton crew of doubtful men and her sickly daughter for company. She sits in her purloined solar, wrapped in furs, staring into the flames that lick pitifully at the meager allotment of wood that the Night’s Watch permit her each day. She’s not quite sure what she is trying to see. Perhaps it is R’hllor, come at last, as promised, come to fulfill the hours of devotion that she, as his faithful servant, has granted him. Perhaps it is their doom, hers and Shireen’s, an image wrought in the ash of the White Walkers that will surely come down from the land beyond the wall and take them all, dragging them into a sleep, or worse yet, an endless life in death. Perhaps it means nothing, and if it is, then all of this has been for nothing, and that is worst of all. 

She does not comfort Shireen much when the girl comes to her, sinking onto the floor beside her mother’s chair, scarred cheek turned inward to hide against the ermine that keeps Selyse from freezing to death in this draughty, tumble-down excuse for a holdfast. Her hand rests lifelessly on her daughter’s hair, and she thinks coldly on her husband, glad that she cannot see her child’s piercing blue eyes and square jaw, too like her father’s face, too much for a little girl almost, for it will only remind her of what she has lost, and the sacrifice that he has made for a dead man's girl, leaving his own to freeze. 

Selyse is angry at first, angry at Stannis for leaving them to rot here, for consigning her and her Florent kin to ramshackle castle after castle in this brutal country. First Eastwatch, which was an insult from which she still rages privately to her Queen’s Men, and now Castle Black, where she is a gilded raven among crows, clad in her black gown with its gilded accents, not out of place among that crows that surround her, squabbling and picking for what little is left. Perhaps it is fitting, this gown of Baratheon obsidian and gold. Perhaps it will become her widow’s weeds. 

Then she is angry at Melisandre, furious with the red woman who has promised her all and shown her nothing save a prophecy that has turned on her, turned on them all. Her voice had so soothed Selyse, had calmed her fury, had given her a purpose and a meaning to the long endless days of idleness and routine that spread before the wife of a great lord, and she had embraced the new faith, had embraced the fire that had so warmed her at first. It has now has left her singed and pained, and finally, numb. She is glad that she does not have to face the priestess now, thankful that she does not have to affect courtesies that Melisandre will so easily penetrate with her sharp words and her knowing eyes. Selyse knows that she would swallow her words but wonder always, that if the gift were so great and the message so clear, why this end, this horrible bitter end, was not foreseen as well? 

But it has been weeks and there is no word. Not from Stannis, nor his men, nor any other northern scavenger. All is as silent as the snows that blanket the barren land in which she now dwells. She refuses to light the fire now, for it is too painful a reminder of her own blindness, and she sits and waits and says nothing. 

And one day there is a raven bearing a tattered parchment with a makeshift seal, a leaping stag, a fiery heart, and she clutches it like a talisman in a hand grown sharp and thin with want. She cares not for the northern dead nor any detail of the battle that surely raged in the lands to the south. She only cares for one thing. He is coming back to them and he is victorious.


End file.
